FIG. 1 is a plan view of a conventional color pixel array shown in The Journal of The Institute of Electronics and Communication Engineers of Japan, Image Engineering Society, Jun. 20, 1986, Page ED-3961. In FIG. 1, one display unit 4a or 4b comprises a red (R) pixel 1, a green (G) pixel 2 and a blue (B) pixel 3. That is, one display unit comprises respective ones of R, G and B pixels.
The amount of light transmitted through each of the color pixels is controlled by a liquid crystal light switch which, in turn, is opened or closed by a display signal applied from a driver circuit section (not shown in FIG. 1), and, thus, color display is provided. Typically, with this color pixel array, information display is provided by applying input display signals to display units such as 4a and 4b each comprising one of each of the three color pixels R, G and B.
According to the prior art display unit arrangment, each display unit includes its own three color pixels. Accordingly, when it is desired to realize large-capacity, high-density information display, the number of pixels increases, which causes problems including the following ones.
(1) Because of a large number of pixels, the number of conductors for the pixels also becomes larger, which may increase occurrences of short-circuiting and conductor breakage. Therefore, the yield of liquid crystal display panels is low, which in turn causes increase of panel manufacturing costs. PA1 (2) For a given display area, an increase in the number of pixels causes the area of one pixel to decrease so that the aperture ratio (percentage of the effective display area) of the entire display device also decreases and display quality decreases. (The non-aperture area (optically ineffective area) of one pixel is determined by the areas of the wiring section and switching elements (such as TFT's) and is constant. Therefore, if the area of one pixel decreases, the aperture ratio also decreases.) PA1 (3) As the number of the pixels increases, the number of elements used in the driver circuit section also increases so that the spacing between lead-out terminals becomes small, which requires high-density packaging. Thus, the packaging costs increase.